Tag Archives: Miyako Fujiwara

The Adele Kassab Gallery located within the Hyman Fine Arts Center of Francis Marion University presents Impressed by Nature an exhibition by Miyako Fujiwara. Born in Hokkaido in Japan, Miyako Fujiwara was interested in ceramics throughout her youth but did not start her relationship with clay until studying tea ceremony after graduating from college in Tokyo, where she studied mathematics.

Later she moved to the U.S. and became involved in the ceramics program at Harvard University while working as an Assistant Curator at the Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, where she helped curate nearly 400,000 archived specimens of birds for both research and exhibition. Benefiting from that extensive program, she gained experience in all varieties of firing: soda, wood, raku, and saggar.

Miyako moved to Charleston at the end of 2010 and became a member at cone 10 studios where she continued to gain practical experience with running the studio, such as mixing glazes, loading and unloading kilns, recycling clay, and setting up exhibits at the cone 10 studios gallery. In 2012, she became a member of Charleston Crafts Cooperative by juried evaluation of her work.

After living in the SC for more than 8 years, she continues to be impressed and inspired by the rich natural history of the Lowcountry. She has been exploring the creative possibilities of expressing the beauty of nature through clay, working with local trees, native plants, shells, bird nests, which also resonates with her experience as a museum curator. She is fascinated by the beauty and complexity of the living environment both visually and structurally.

This exhibition “Impressed by Nature” emphasizes the richness and beauty of nature in the Carolina Lowcountry, which she enjoys daily and which is quite opposite from the synthetic beauty of the controlled urban landscape of Tokyo. For this exhibition Miyako also explored more hand-building techniques to express organic shapes, patterns and colors in oxidation firing.